


The Rain Stung Like Silver

by ThisDominionIsMine



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Caretaking, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pack Mother Stiles Stilinski, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isaac is missing half his face when he turns up at Stiles' door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rain Stung Like Silver

Isaac is missing half his face when he turns up at Stiles’ door. Well, maybe less than half of it. The actual mass of his head has not been reduced by fifty percent, but there is still… less than there should be. Stiles concentrates on the theoretical math of the situation, because then he doesn’t have to consider the sheer amount of skin that’s been ripped away to expose gleaming muscle and that yellow packet of fat peeking out from under Isaac’s cheekbone, or look at his left ear, which is half-gone and oozing a steady trickle of blood down the ruined side of Isaac’s neck to join the rest of the gore that is soaking into his once-upon-a-time green shirt and painting his douchepack leather jacket. And Stiles isn’t even going to _think_ about the fact that he can see into Isaac’s nasal cavity.

“Welcome home, honey,” he says when Isaac bulls past him into the entryway. “Clearly you already know my dad’s out tonight, but try not to bleed on anything obvious.” He closes the door, locks it, checks the empty street through the glass. “Alphas?”

Isaac sneers with what’s left of his mouth. “Trap.” It comes out slurred, no ‘p’ on the end, air whistling through the hole where Isaac’s nose should be, the edges of his lips healing themselves as Stiles watches, red flesh sluggishly knitting together over the pink gums. He looks away so he doesn’t retch.

“You weren’t alone, were you?”

Isaac shakes his head, wrinkles his forehead muscles, makes a small, pained sound in the bottom of his throat. There is blood all over his teeth. “’oyd. Got out ‘ine.”

“And you came here because…?”

Isaac turns away to trot upstairs and doesn’t answer. Stiles follows him up into the bathroom, where Isaac stands in front of the mirror, studying himself. Both his eyes are intact (thank god) but the majority of his nose and mouth has been literally torn off, flesh scooped out of his cheek in a ragged pattern, the damage swiping over to mangle his ear and the area around his hairline, down to his neck, though the bloody fragments there look older – his body healed the most important areas first.

“Will you be offended if I say you look like Two-Face?”

“And i’ I say you’re desensitized?” Isaac pulls open the medicine cabinet.

Stiles wipes at his mouth with the sleeve of his sweatshirt – he’d been eating pizza before Isaac turned up. Oh god. “Desensitized by necessity, not choice. Unless you’d _prefer_ for me to be blowing chunks at the sight of you which, believe me, is a totally viable option.”

“Shut u’.” Isaac rummages around for a few moments, then stops, withdraws empty-handed, and it’s only because Stiles is looking for it that he sees Isaac’s hands shaking. “Where’s Scott?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing. You’re the one attached to his hip now. Or _hips_ , I should say.”

Isaac folds his arms across his chest and stares into the mirror, silent once more. Stiles isn’t jealous or anything. No, really, he isn’t. Good for Allison, getting herself out of Beacon Hills, going to private school, staying out of this mess. Good for Scott for finding something – someone – to occupy himself with when Stiles couldn’t because Derek kept dragging him out for meetings with Kali or Deucalion or Deaton or some other mystical mojo figurine that had the power to keep their miserable excuse for pack from being decimated by the Alphas. Good for everybody. (And especially good for Derek, for learning that thing with his mouth in New York, for deciding to use it on Stiles after that night Stiles stopped him from getting his skull smashed to splinters in the Beacon Hills Dump, for hauling himself out of his shell, for deciding to shove Stiles into beds instead of walls. Good… good for Derek.)

Stiles clears his throat. “That was a low blow. Sorry.”

Isaac grunts. He shrugs off the douchepack jacket, and Stiles winces at the wet slap it makes as it hits the tiles. There is artery-red blood staining the shoulders of Isaac’s shirt, seguing into darker, deoxygenated blood from the veins, and the crusty rust-red of drying blood. His face is still healing itself, but slowly. In twenty-seven months of dealing with werewolves, Stiles has learned why: they can do massive, rapid, life-saving repairs, but this consumes a tremendous amount of energy, and as their blood sugar plummets and their metabolism slows the rate of healing drops to a crawl. Relatively. Isaac may be walking around with exposed muscle in his face for a few hours, but he’ll be back to Cupid-style perfection by morning.

“I have pizza downstairs,” Stiles hears himself say. “And garlic knots.”

Isaac pokes at the fat in his cheek.

“That is gross. That is… don’t do that.”

The muscles twitch like Isaac should be smiling, and he seems to brace himself, one hand gripping the counter, nails of the other sharpening into claws, and then he reaches between the torn muscle fibers to pluck off a piece of the fat and flick it at Stiles, who flinches.

“You are _disgusting_ ,” he says. “But seriously: yes or no on the pizza?”

Isaac goes back to the mirror. “Yes.”

Stiles flees. He’s not nearly as bothered by the visible motion of Isaac’s facial muscles as he is by how blasé Isaac has become about getting torn to shit; how easily he has decided that Stiles is a safe place, a safe person; and how Stiles himself hasn’t really gone into any sort of shock about having someone with a decent chunk of his face ripped out invade his house and bathroom, like these are everyday things, blood and trauma and the reek of bleach.

He grabs the hydrogen peroxide from under the sink, brings it upstairs with the pizza. He says “I hope you didn’t like that shirt,” even though he’s seen Isaac wear it three other times in the last month, and picks up the jacket with the tips of his fingers while Isaac yanks the shirt over his head. Stiles doesn’t know anything about leather; if Isaac gives a shit about saving it, he’ll have to bring it to Derek.

The pizza box sits on the counter, peroxide atop it, blood already speckling the sink. Isaac moves the bleach off to the side and opens the box, studying the remaining slices before grabbing one, tearing off a corner of the crust, and jamming it into his mouth.

Because Stiles has gone through enough horror-movie scenes in his life without watching someone with half a face chew and swallow, he moves around Isaac to the medicine cabinet to take his turn staring helplessly at the contents. “Is there anything in here that’s actually going to be of use, or do you just, I don’t know, try not to lean on anything and reabsorb it as part of your face while you heal?”

There’s a moment of awkward silence while Isaac tries to navigate the logistics of swallowing a bolus without lips, then he grunts a “Dunno” and pulls off another piece.

“And can you drink, or…?”

“Hadn’t tried. Thirsty, though.” Isaac reaches under the sink for the paper cups they keep there (and, wow, okay, officially way too familiar with Stiles’ house), fills one with tap water, examines it, then tries to set the lip of it between his teeth and drink. Half of it ends up on the counter.

Stiles makes a few useless fluttering motions. “Do that, like… you know when people share water bottles and are paranoid about germs? And they, you know, hold it way up and tilt their head back and sort of pour…?”

Isaac nods, which is a relief, because Stiles doesn’t know if he’s capable of demonstrating the tactic in cramped quarters with someone like Isaac, who this mix of broken and dangerous that is 100% Hollywood and totally not someone that Stiles wants to look like a dumbass in front of. He doesn’t know why he cares. Isaac thinking he’s a dumbass is better than Derek thinking it, or his dad, or the admissions department at UC Berkely, or…

Isaac tips his chin up and opens his jaws as he raises the cup, water trickling down in a clear stream until the cup is empty. He pauses, thinking, then makes an abortive attempt at swallowing that ends with most of the water being gagged up, spilling over his chin and streaking tracks through the blood on his throat and chest – but some of it goes down, judging by the gurgle and the relieved slackening of the muscles in his face.

Stiles feels a sudden, burning shame over all the ill will he’s held towards Isaac, which clearly hasn’t been reciprocated, especially in recent times. Isaac is here, after all, instead of at Scott’s or Derek’s – he’s here, looking human and weak and miserable, because werewolf powers don’t make you supremely able, not when you’re past a certain point of being shredded and broken, and it’s not Isaac’s fault that he’s spent so much of his life feeling this specific brand of weak and incompetent.

“My dad won’t be home for a couple more hours. You can stay in my room, if you want. He won’t barge in if he thinks I’m asleep.”

“That will count as ‘leeding on something o’vious,” Isaac says.

Stiles goes over to the linen closet. “There are these things called towels that we have, and nobody will notice if they get bleached because they’re white anyway.”

Isaac rolls his eyes. There is movement in his nasal cavity as his sinuses start repairing themselves, and a thin growth of cartilage is commencing outwards at a snail’s place. He turns on the sink and picks up a washcloth. “’Ahtever.”

Sighing, Stiles grabs the shirt and jacket and lets him be. He tosses the clothes over the chair in his room, tugs off his shirt and punts his shorts into the laundry basket, then goes back to the linen closet for a towel. The bathroom door is shut, splashing from the sink the only noise to be heard. Stiles folds the towel over one of his pillows, then crawls into bed, head on the other pillow, spine pressed against the wall. When he glances at the doorway a few seconds later Isaac is standing there, shirtless but with spatters of blood on his jeans, watching him.

Stiles pulls back the blankets. “You’re welcome over here, dude. But turn off the light, ‘cause I ain’t getting out of bed to do it.”

The light snaps off and the floorboards creak as Isaac crosses the room. Stiles can make out the vague shape of him shucking off his jeans next to the bed, and then Isaac is sliding under the sheets, all long legs and knobby joints and ninety-eight-point-six degrees of heat, his skin damp. The bed is too narrow, so he ends up tucked against Stiles, both of them breathing shallowly and trying not to jostle the other, and it’s awkward, awkward, awkward with all the attempts to minimize contact. And then Stiles thinks _screw it_ and slips one leg between Isaac’s and throws an arm over his ribs and says “I probably should have warned you about the limited accommodations.”

“It’s fine,” Isaac mumbles. He touches Stiles’ knuckles carefully with the tips of his fingers, then lets his hand drop. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Just… yeah, we’ll have to do a check for bloodstains in the morning before my dad gets up. You think you’ll be fine by then?”

“Nose itches like hell. Think that means it’s growing ‘ack. E’rything else, too.”

“Guess we’ll see.”

“Yeah.”

“Alright then.” Stiles shoves his face into the pillow and closes his eyes. “See you in the morning.”

***

Isaac, in the morning, has not just his nose back, but also his lips and left ear, which is really a fabulous way to start the day. He’d rinsed the sink out with bleach the previous night, and all obvious bloodstains are confined to his shirt and jacket and the towel he slept on, which looks like a child was fingerpainting with blood on it and immediately goes for a bath in bleach.

When Stiles’ dad walks downstairs, there are two shirtless teenage boys standing in front of the stove flicking pancake batter at one another, and the one without the Stilinski surname is not Scott McCall. He does not question this, being more curious about the empty pizza box left in the upstairs restroom, and when Stiles sputters an excuse and dashes upstairs to retrieve it the sheriff and Isaac are left staring at each other across the kitchen.

The sheriff looks at the bowl of batter. “Are those blueberry pancakes?”

Isaac licks his lips. “Yeah.”

The sheriff heads over to the pantry and pulls out a yellow plastic package. He studies Isaac for a moment, then slides the package across the counter towards him. Chocolate chips. “Do it quickly, before Stiles comes back down,” he says.

Isaac’s grin hurts his face.

 


End file.
